Recent technological advances have led to video transmission becoming a more prevalently utilized form of communication. For instance, video data can be captured, encoded, and transferred over a transmission channel. Further, the video data can be received via the transmission channel, decoded, and outputted (e.g., rendered, displayed, . . . ). Various video coding techniques can be used to provide video compression, error resilience (ER), and so forth. For instance, video compression techniques can be used to reduce the quantity of data utilized to represent video images; thus, compressed video can reduce bandwidth used for transfer of digital video over the transmission channel. Interframe compression, for example, is a type of video compression that can use one or more earlier or later frames in a sequence of frames to compress a current frame. Moreover, error resilience (ER) techniques are oftentimes used with video transmissions to mitigate errors that can occur when video is transferred via a transmission channel.
Video streaming services over a communication network have received tremendous attention from both academia and industry. For fast and user friendly browsing, it is desirable that video streaming systems be able to provide effective video cassette recording (VCR) functionalities such as forward, backward, pause, and random access. However, traditional hybrid video coding schemes typically complicate reverse-play operations. Under a simple ‘IPPP . . . ’ group of picture (GOP) structure, a last P-frame in a sequence that forms the GOP typically can only be decoded after all other frames in the GOP are transmitted and decoded. This can require a significant storage buffer in the decoder to store the decoded frames in the GOP. Alternatively, if a storage buffer is not used to store the decoded frames in the GOP for reverse playback, previous frames (e.g., frames earlier in the sequence of the GOP structure organized in temporal order) need to be transmitted and decoded over and over, thus wasting resources such as processor cycles, bandwidth, and the like.
To reduce costs of storage and bandwidth of reverse playback, various schemes have been proposed including online transcoding schemes and dual-bitstream schemes, for instance. However, such conventional techniques commonly fail to achieve reversibility with both low extra storage and low extra bandwidth simultaneously.